REMINISCENT RETROSPECTIVES

Meteorological obligatiwith JENNIFER PAULL

'And if we look at the works of J S Bach -- a benevolent god to which
all musicians should offer a prayer to defend themselves against mediocrity
-- on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday,
from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater
than anything we have since discovered. And in his works we will search
in vain for anything the least lacking in good taste.'

-- Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

After leaving Grammar School, I spent a year at the Liverpool Matthay
School of Music before taking a further two at the Royal College of Music
in London. In fact, this first year was invaluable. It turned out to be
one of the best decisions I ever made. As in London, I was left pretty much
to my own devices, but in Liverpool, I had an orchestra to which to listen
and no restriction in attending their rehearsals. These were the days of
John Pritchard, and I listened and learned far more about orchestral playing
and the standard, and not-so-standard repertoire, than I ever could as a
student in London.

I was taking oboe as my principal study, and had branched out from piano,
to study organ with Dr J Roland Middleton, organist of Chester Cathedral.
It was he whose presented Bach's Christmas Oratorio in that
wonderful cathedral setting that was to be my first professional orchestral
engagement.

I sat spellbound as the principal oboist played the transposition of
an obligato for an instrument marked 'oboe d'amore'.
I asked what it was. 'Some old oboe nobody ever uses any more', was the
reply. 'Prepare Thyself Zion' is an aria for contralto with a solo obligato
melodic line for oboe d'amore, the alto oboe. Although I wasn't
playing it myself, I saw the name of my future instrument written on a score
for the very first time.

I have a collage of wonderful memories of that day. After the afternoon
rehearsal, we had all been invited for refreshments in Dr Middleton's
home. As the cathedral organist, he lived just beside it in a lovely old
Georgian house. There was a log fire blazing in the hearth. It was Christmas
time and there was a coating of snow. The walls in his music room were a
cheerful red, and I have never forgotten how warm and friendly his house
was to enter. The ceiling, wood work and fireplace were as crisp a white
as the snow outside, and the windows and sofa were covered in a cheerful
white chintz with large red pointsetias and deep green leaves. There was
a lot of dark wood glowing with lavender-scented polish, and brass candlesticks
shone in the glow of the flames.

Inside Chester Cathedral there is a mediaeval painting of the Madonna
and Child. Perfect after many centuries, this treasure is painted on a silk
canvas made from spiders' webs. Everything about that concert seemed
magical, the music, the painting, and the warmth of this kind musician's
home.

I chose this same obligato line to play with a few local musicians
in Shiraz, in the very cradle of what had been the Persian Empire. I was
about to play by myself, knowing that I alone could hear the contralto's
aria and the accompaniment in my head. The local musicians, hearing my instrument
and this music for the first time, were to respond to my playing and the
music I performed in their own musical language. This time, I was deliberately
using Bach's haunting melody as a gesture of friendship, putting my
musical hand forward in greeting without any idea of the result. Of course,
I could have chosen to play anything at all, but the strong rhythm of this
obligato seemed ideal. I was going to demonstrate the most usual
usage of my instrument within its own culture, after all. They responded
with the same, in theirs. Differences were very apparent, but somehow, unimportant.